While it wasn’t exactly high cinema, the Twilight movies successfully brought Stephanie Meyer’s hit book series to the big screen and made a whole bunch of money along the way. Known in its entirety as ‘The Twilight Saga’, the first installment was released in 2008, with a new film landing each year until wrapping up with Breaking Dawn – Part 2 in 2012. When all was said and done the five movies cumulatively grossed a massive $3.35 billion at the box office, making Twilight one of the biggest franchises on Earth and Robert Pattinson into a star
Next month you can revisit the romance, the sparkly skin, the bizarre plot developments, and the creepy CGI baby when the Twilight saga hits Netflix on July 16. Now that the dust has settled and the snide jabs have died down, the movies are iconic in their own peculiar way, and act as a great time capsule of late 2000s/early 2010s culture.
In addition, fans should be thankful those adaptations are faithful, as Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke revealed in 2018 that MTV and Paramount’s original plans for the movies departed heavily from the books. In an interview she said:
“Bella was a track star in the first scene, not an every-girl kind of awkward and clumsy [kid]… she was like a bad ass, and then it escalated into this whole thing where there were CIA agents on jet skis trying to find the vampires, you know. It really went, ‘Whooooo!’”
While I do kinda want to see the CIA jet ski vampire movie, I agree that it doesn’t sound very Twilight.
So, what’s next for Twilight? Well, an adaptation of the recent book Midnight Sun movie seems unlikely as it simply retells the narrative of the first film/book, but perhaps at some point we might get a remake, though that depends on whether new generations of readers decide to pick up the series. Given how devoted the fanbase still is, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a full resurgence of Twilight fever coming down the line.
Meanwhile, you can next see Robert Pattinson in The Batman, which arrives March 4, 2022.
